We are entering an era in which “cultural construction of the body” refers to a literal technological enterprise. This era was anticipated in the 1920s by geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in a lecture which inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In that lecture, Haldane reinterpreted the Greek myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur as heroic fable. Seventy years later another geneticist, François Jacob, used the same myth as cautionary tale. Here I explain the Minotaur's “genetic” monstrosity in terms of (...) disability and hybridity, using the movie Gattaca to argue that ancient fears of monstrously disabled bodies are being recycled as bioethics. (shrink)

ChickenHawk is a social-dilemma game that distinguishes uncoordinated from coordinated cooperation. In tests with players belonging to a culturally homogeneous population, natural-language “cheap talk” led to efficient coordination, while nonlinguistic signaling yielded uncoordinated altruism. In a subsequent test with players from a moderately more heterogeneous population nearby, the “cheap talk” condition still produced better coordination than other signaling conditions, but at a lower level and with fewer acts of altruism overall. Implications are: (1) without language, even willing cooperators coordinate poorly; (...) (2) given a sufficiently homogeneous social group, language can coordinate cooperation in the face of opportunities for anonymous defection; (3) coordination therefore depends not on merely a general propensity to cooperate but on the overlap of social identities, which are always costly to acquire and maintain. So far as linguistic variation establishes how much social identities overlap, natural-language “cheap talk” is self-insuring, suggesting that linguistic variation is itself adaptive. (shrink)

In this paper we shall introduce a simple temporal logic suitable for reasoning about the temporal aspects of parallel universes, parallel processes, distributed systems, or multiple agents. We will use a variant of the mosaic method to prove decidability of this logic. We also show that the logic does not have the finite model property. This shows that the mosaic method is sometimes a stronger way of establishing decidability.

The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Psychological Ethics is a valuable resource for psychologists and graduate students hoping to further develop their ethical decision making beyond more introductory ethics texts. The book offers real-world ethical vignettes and considerations. Chapters cover a wide range of practice settings, populations, and topics, and are written by scholars in these settings. Chapters focus on the application of ethics to the ethical dilemmas in which mental health and other psychology professionals sometimes find themselves. Each chapter introduces (...) a setting and gives readers a brief understanding of some of the potential ethical issues at hand, before delving deeper into the multiple ethical issues that must be addressed and the ethical principles and standards involved. No other book on the market captures the breadth of ethical issues found in daily practice and focuses entirely on applied ethics in psychology. (shrink)

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used to guide perception. The current set of simulations investigated whether this statistical structure within events can be used 1) to develop stable internal representations that facilitate perception and 2) to learn when (...) to update such representations in a self-organizing manner. These simulations demonstrate that experience with recurring patterns enables a system to accurately predict upcoming stimuli within an event, to identify boundaries between such events based on transient increases in prediction error, and to use such boundaries to improve prediction about subsequent activities. (shrink)

Scholarly open-access publishing has made it easier for researchers to discover and report academic misconduct such as plagiarism. However, as the website Retraction Watch shows, plagiarism is by no means limited to open-access journals. Moreover, various web-based services provide plagiarism detection software, facilitating one’s ability to detect pirated content. Upon discovering plagiarism, some are compelled to report it, but being a plagiarism whistleblower is inherently stressful and can leave one vulnerable to criticism and retaliation by colleagues and others. Reporting plagiarism (...) can also draw the threat of legal action. This article draws upon our experiences as plagiarism whistleblowers with several goals in mind: to help would-be whistleblowers be better prepared for making well-founded allegations, to give whistleblowers some idea of what they can expect when reporting plagiarism, and to give suggestions for reducing whistleblowers’ vulnerability to threats and stress. (shrink)

Of Goals and Goods and Floundering About: A Dissensus Report on Clinical Ethics Consultation Content Type Journal Article Pages 275-291 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9101-1 Authors Jeffrey P. Bishop, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Joseph B. Fanning, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Mark J. Bliton, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End (...) Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 3. (shrink)

Guiding our response in this essay is our view that current efforts to demarcate the role of the clinical ethicist risk reducing its complex network of authorizations to sites of power and payment. In turn, the role becomes susceptible to various ideologies—individualisms, proceduralisms, secularisms—that further divide the body from the web of significances that matter to that body, where only she, the patient, is located. The security of policy, standards, and employment will pull against and eventually sever the authorization secured (...) by authentic moral inquiry. Instead of asking “What do I need to know?”, the question animating the drive to standardize will be “What is the policy or standard?” The claims of the authors in this issue of HEC Forum confirm these suspicions. (shrink)

Erratum to: Echo Calling Narcissus: What Exceeds the Gaze of Clinical Ethics Consultation? Content Type Journal Article Pages 171-171 DOI 10.1007/s10730-010-9132-7 Authors Jeffrey P. Bishop, Saint Louis University Tenet Chair of Health Care Ethics, Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics Salus Center, Room 527, 3545 Lafayette Ave St. Louis MO 63104-1314 USA Joseph B. Fanning, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Ave., 4th Floor, Suite 400 Nashville TN 37203 USA Mark J. Bliton, (...) Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Ave., 4th Floor, Suite 400 Nashville TN 37203 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 22 Journal Issue Volume 22, Number 2. (shrink)

In response to the preceding research report by Professor Steele, television news director Jeffrey Marks suggests that TV news photographers operate in a world not entirely of their own making. They are often treated as pieces of equipment whose insights and judgments are not taken into consideration when newscasts are produced. Seeing the world through a two?inch black and white viewfinder causes some distorted perceptions of reality and a certain detachment from ethical decision making. The author, chairman of the (...) Radio?Television News Directors Association's ethics commutee, offers some suggestions for correcting the ethical morass. (shrink)

This paper investigates how environmental structure, given the innate properties of a population, affects the degree to which this population can adapt to the environment. The model we explore involves simple agents in a 2-d world which can sense a local food distribution and, as specified by their genomes, move to a new location and ingest the food there. Adaptation in this model consists of improving the genomic sensorimotor mapping so as to maximally exploit the environmental resources. We vary environmental (...) structure to see its specific effect on adaptive success. In our investigation, two properties of environmental structure, conditioned by the sensorimotor capacities of the agents, have emerged as significant factors in determining adaptive success: (1) the information content of the environment which quantifies the diversity of conditions sensed, and (2) the expected utility for optimal action. These correspond to the syntactic and pragmatic aspects of environmental information, respectively. We find that the ratio of expected utility to information content predicts adaptive success measured by population gain and information content alone predicts the fraction of ideal utility achieved. These quantitative methods and specific conclusions should aid in understanding the effects of environmental structure on evolutionary adaptation in a wide range of evolving systems, both artificial and natural. (shrink)

We give a Hilbert style axiomatization for the set of formulas in the temporal language with Until and Since which are valid over the real number flow of time. The axiomatization, which is orthodox in the sense of only having the usual temporal rules of inference, is complete with respect to single formulas.

It is shown that the decision problem for the temporal logic with until and since connectives over real-numbers time is PSPACE-complete. This is the most practically useful dense time temporal logic.

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation (...) than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls “improvisatory fluency in historical idioms,” and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of “ear” that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation. (shrink)

We present a Hilbert style axiomatisation for the set of formulas in the temporal language with F and P which are valid over non-transitive cyclical flows of time. We also give a simpler axiomatisation using the slightly controversial 'irreflexivity rule' and go on to prove the decidability of any temporal logic over cyclical time provided it uses only connectives with first-order tables.

We present an axiomatisation for the first-order temporal logic with connectives Until and Since over the class of all linear flows of time. Completeness of the axiom system is proved.We also add a few axioms to find a sound and complete axiomatisation for the first order temporal logic of Until and Since over rational numbers time.

The design inference uncovers intelligent causes by isolating the key trademark of intelligent causes: specified events of small probability. Just about anything that happens is highly improbable, but when a highly improbable event is also specified (i.e., conforms to an independently given pattern) undirected natural causes lose their explanatory power. Design inferences can be found in a range of scientific pursuits from forensic science to research into the origins of life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

We introduce a new way of defining metric temporal logic on a real-numbers flow of time. The idea is based on having semantics which allow us to refer to a single universal clock of arbitrary precision in order to impose metric constraints. This gives us a new metric temporal logic which is very expressive, is natural to use, can be applied in very general situations, affords a wide range of useful abbreviations and operators, has a PSPACE decision procedure, and has (...) the promise of being amenable to standard reasoning techniques. Thus it has many advantages over the existing metric temporal logics. We provide a decision procedure via conversion to a non-metric temporal logic, hence doing metric reasoning with no clocks. (shrink)

Factors such as subsistence turnover, warfare, or interaction between different groups can be major sources of cultural change in human populations. Global demographic shifts such as the transition to agriculture during the Neolithic and more recently the urbanization and globalization of the twentieth century have been major catalysts for cultural change. Here, we test whether cultural traits such as patri/matrilocality and postmarital migration persist in the face of social upheaval and gene flow during the past 150 years in postcolonial South (...) Africa. The recent history of South Africa has seen major demographic shifts that resulted in the displacement and forced sedentism of indigenous Khoekhoe and San populations. During the expansion of the colonial frontier, the Khoe-San admixed with European colonists and enslaved individuals from West/Central Africa, Indonesia, and South Asia, introducing novel cultural norms. We conducted demographic interviews among Nama and Cederberg communities representing nearly 3,000 individuals across three generations. Despite the history of colonial expansion, and the subsequent incorporation of Khoe-San and Khoe-San-descendant communities into a colonial society with strong patrilocal norms, patrilocality is the least common postmarital residence pattern in our study populations today. Our results suggest that more recent forces of integration into the market economy are likely the primary drivers of change in the cultural traits examined in our study. Birthplace had a strong effect on an individual’s odds of migration, distance moved, and postmarital residence form. These effects are at least partially explained by the population size of the birthplace. Our results suggest that market factors local to birthplaces are important drivers of residence decisions, although the frequency of matrilocal residence and a geographic and temporal cline in migration and residence patterns also indicate the persistence of some historic Khoe-San cultural traits in contemporary groups. (shrink)

This much-needed book provides a thorough account of temporal logic, one of the most important areas of logic in computer science today. The book begins with a solid introduction to semantical and axiomatic approaches to temporal logic. It goes on to cover predicate temporal logic, meta-languages, general theories of axiomatization, many dimensional systems, propositional quantifiers, expressive power, Henkin dimension, temporalization of other logics, and decidability results. With its inclusion of cutting-edge results and unifying methodologies, this book is an indispensable reference (...) for both the pure logician and the theoretical computer scientist. (shrink)